It's just that the French name got associated with the act of cutting fine sticks in English, it sounds cooler than cutting fine sticks. Probably popularized by some famous chef that wrote books or did tv shows. It doesn't make the cutting technique French.
You're right of course but it's not really the point is it - it's an adopted English term, these 'techniques' are used the world over including by amateurs.
And I don't know Japanese, but it doesn't even seem like they have a plethora of more descriptive terms for it than 'finely diced', 'roughly diced' etc. when they're both something-kiri too, for example.
I was mostly poking fun at the commenters on this article at the time and their absolutist literalist reading of the article headline. Japan didn't invent these techniques necessarily, but they are a part of the defined culture of Japanese cuisine. Like French cuisine, there are defined processes for how a vegetable is treated for a specific context, whereas an amateur or other cuisine might not make a big point of dicing vs chopping for example.
From my imperfect understanding of Japanese cuisine, there is usually "a way to prepare a dish" and deviation from that way can be unwanted or problematic, a bit of a social faux pas.
That's probably much stronger in Japanese culture sure, but to continue the Julienne example, 'properly' done it's not simply matchsticks - it's thicker and shorter than people often think/would do to show off their knife skills.
But yes sure, deviate in France and you might get some bad reviews, be labelled avant-garde, but it's probably fine, and you might be on the way to greatness. I'm pretty ignorant of Japanese culture (not that I'm French either, just spent many holidays there and none in Japan) but I can believe there'd be a stronger visceral reaction to that sort of thing. Boycott the insauspicious restaurant or whatever.
Maybe I can help with some context. Broadly speaking, there is a Western style (French) and Eastern style. The big difference is that French cooking is very systematized, Escoffier took inspiration from his time in the army, as such, we have cooking “brigades”.
In Eastern style, especially in Japanese/Sushi culinary world, you still julienne a veg similar to all other culinary cultures but Sushi requires special modification for each dish. It’s not saying it’s superior or whatnot, it’s just that sushi requires 5-7 different “types” of julienne, that all have a specific name, as an example.
Some of those techniques are so specific, they aren’t translated or practiced outside of sushi preparation and may not have a “name”.
Not very unique to Japan. You can also see these techniques in other East Asian countries like China, Korea. Japanese guys are good at promoting their cultures anyway.
It's a blog about Japanese food which is why they're talking about "Japanese techniques."
This article places the shapes or cutting techniques described within the context of Japanese cuisine. That someone somewhere else has at one time or another cut a vegetable does not really reflect on the formal techniques of a cuisine whether that be French, Chinese, Italian, Korean, Japanese or other cuisines that put a significant focus on defined techniques and following specific processes.
This should be the top comment. It's like criticizing a tutorial page on pythonguy.com titled "Python techniques for copying data structures" because the author didn't explain that the same techniques are used in Julia.
Maybe readers are inferring some nationalistic element to a cooking tutorial, where people assume that a description of techniques used in Japanese cooking is some kind of claim to ownership of them?
I think this article is interesting on its own terms, because regardless of your heritage, if you haven't studied cooking you might not have experimented with how you cut vegetables. I always used to just straight chop everything when I made a stir fry, but now I try to be more creative.
I'm not sure these are necessarily limited to east Asia (minus the apple dragons at the end). This reminds me -- entirely orthogonal -- of the big deal made about the fact that pyramids were constructed on disconnected continents. Seems to me it boils down to geometry and physics -- there are only so many ways to heap stuff. Same with the veggies. These are just the natural permutations for the most part.
As for techniques, my favorite is cutting a minimal slice off of round items (think onions) to use as a flat stable bottom before attempting thin slicing.
> Sometimes also referred to as Kokotto-kiri (ココット切り) for smaller versions. I have no idea what that is in reference to.
This likely refers to “cocotte” [0], the French term for a kind of casserole that might be used for dishes for which that vegetable cut shape is typical — or maybe the shape of the cut is reminiscent of the shape of a cocotte.
I'm interested in how it's a kind of casserole, if you can expand on that (en anglaise svp!)?
English Wikipedia cocotte disambiguation suggests French oven, which redirects to Dutch oven, which is just what Americans call a casserole.
Is it the enamelling, which Wikipedia suggests is sometimes used as a distinguishing feature between 'Dutch' and 'French' ovens? (I've (British) never heard of the latter before.)
Apparently a cocotte is also an 'elegant prostitute'/courtesan, meaning 'small child' before that. So is a cocotte a small casserole, peut être?
While the “-tte” indicates a diminutive, cocottes aren’t particularly small. I wrote “a kind of” because I associate particular materials with them, including the enamel, which I don’t necessarily with what is called a casserole in English (which in turn is different from what is called a “casserole” in French, which is more a sauce pan). Maybe someone else has better knowledge about those cookware terms.
It seems cocotte = English 'casserole'; casserole = saucepan.
The enamel vs. cast iron interior of a cocotte IME in the UK is not significant, but in the US going by Wikipedia anyway enamel = French oven; pas d'enamel = Dutch oven.
...I suppose we've no hope of agreeing on all this if we can't even have a 'cup' be the same size! (Or convince Americans that they shouldn't be (and in many cases would find it easier if they weren't) using volumetric measures for everything anyway, for that matter.)
Oh ok, in (British) English I'd just call that a casserole. (Which per sibling comment from GGP I understand is not the same/more specific than a casserole in French.) So I suppose it's correct that it ends up at 'Dutch oven' (the predominantly American term for the same) on Wikipedia.
I'm afraid my French isn't up to reading a Wikipedia entry, which is why I asked (GGP linked the same article).
In Japan, I've known the term "Kokotto" to refer a ramekin vessel. Yeah, it's also a kind of french dish, though I don't think it's too commonly known in Japan.
As for the cut, I'd hardly call it a Japanese cutting technique.
Why is it that the stereotypical love of intense systematisation and specialisation in Japanese crafts doesn't seem to extend to software?
I have seen a few pieces of Japanese megacorp software that's you would have thought would be produced by their better teams (kernel code for major profit-centre products) and it was always dreadful.
I know megacorp software is often terrible, but this was a whole new level. It was like the "the intern's code" jokes on The Coding Love, but real and very serious (NDAs and everything).
Certainly when looking at it, I didn't have visions of a grandmaster lovingly using the exact, named, carefully maintained, tool for the job.
From what friends said who worked there in the early 00s it's been that way for a while. Hardware was the rockstar. This is part of why Sony Japan finally relented and let the eu/us do the software on the PlayStation and Japan focused on the hardware making an excellent parternership.
I don't think so. That's maybe 10-15 years ago, but currently (according to this: https://benesse.jp/juken/202105/20210501-1.html, a survey made just 2021), a programmer is the 3rd, and a system engineer is the 4th highest desired occupation among Japanese high-schoolers, after a nurse and a local government official.
I assure you, Japanese high schoolers also say they want to be influencers, YouTubers, and TikTok celebrities. That just wouldn’t fly on Benesse’s blog (they run a cram school).
It does extend, just it results in a moving castle of an infoelectromechanical self complication with overly bureaucratic interfaces, tons of back channel behaviors and tangential error messages.
The Japanese culture is not known to focus on setting global goals and recursively dividing it into local decision makings and actions. Rather it’s optimized for optimizing local behaviors, which yields amazing features, but often only as features.
I started reading the article and was bored out of my mind. But then the author told me these weren't simple cutting techniques I have already used over and over for decades, but japanese cutting techniques. Naturally this gave it a mysterious and exotic flavor I had never experienced before and now I feel like a medieval ninja when I slice my pretend-japanese carrots! /s
Japanese cooking skill is kind of methodical, fine toolings (knifes, dishes, heating method); kind of mixing of traditional oriental and western influences.
Chinese cooking is plain art. Very limited toolings but plenty of beauty and transformation of food into pleasure.
By the way, although the "secret Japanese techniques" aspect of this is a little overblown (little here is really that interesting), there is at least one reason for this to be highlighted at all. Given that forks and knives are not the common utensils of the north* Asian dining table, most things are pre-cut for consumption. If you ever encounter steak/pork/katsu chops, etc. at a restaurant, you will find that they are all pre-cut for you to be able to consume in bite sized pieces. You'll never get a whole slab of chicken breast or pork chop for you to dissect with chopsticks.
>> Given that forks and knives are not the common utensils of the Asian dining table
Asia is a big umbrella, my friend. (You can Google for how many countries.) You’d be surprised to know there are Asian countries that went from hands to spoon-and-fork hundreds of years ago and never knew chopsticks. But of course this notion is not exotic enough.
Well, I just mean those restaurants that are not western food. You're usually going to get chopsticks and the reasoning is for that. Thailand, etc. may get an exception to the story, fine.
Where I live in the Midwest US, most people from Asia or with Asian ancestry are Hmong, Korean, Chinese or Japanese. Essentially, "Asian" has become a euphemism for "East Asian". There's a notable exception in Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo Clinic and related industry drew a lot of immigration from India.
As a result, "India" is occasionally lumped in with "South Asia" but is typically referred to as its own entity in lay conversation.
I suspect part of that is proximity to the middle east, which is also rarely lumped in with "Asia" in colloquial conversation, and general confusion or laziness over needing to specify the "east" part of "east Asia".
Other parts of the country probably speak differently based on who lives there.
I can say this though - if I want to go to a restaurant for "Asian" food, it'll usually be Chinese, Japanese or Vietnamese, and the restaurant will typically offer dishes from at least two of those cuisines (sometimes authentic, sometimes heavily tailored to a Midwestern pallet). On the other hand, if I want Indian food, I'm going to an Indian restaurant, and the closest thing on offer to one of the other above cuisines is some variation of a Manchurian dish from Mumbai, depending on what regional focus or focuses the restaurant offers.
नमस्कार। To give the benefit of the doubt - in the UK (and perhaps elsewhere) India is practically never considered 'Asian' in common parlance. As if 'the Indian subcontinent' (as is said) were actually a continent almost, subordinate to nothing.
I am curious now though - obviously spoons have been around 'forever' but as eating utensils do they predate British/Portugese colonialism do you know? I understand today spoon/bread/hand is dish, region, and perhaps to some extent class/personal preference dependent, but has it 'always' been so?
(I'm honestly not doing a 'be thankful we brought you spoons' bit here.. I hope it doesn't come across that way. Just genuinely curious as a हिंदी और भारतीय खाने का विद्यार्थी (student of Hindi and Indian food).)
Asia really should unite and push to deprecate this term. There’s practically nothing we share all across this so-called Asia metaregion, except it’s neither the West nor the Africa.
Not saying the article says they're "secret". I'm just observing that for some reason, given the identification of these cutting techniques as specifically Japanese, given headline status here at HN, on the very existence of an article about a fairly mundane task, it seems to imply something special (and in the click-baity "secret techniques the kitchen doesn't want you to know about" memes) about this.
Correct, nowhere in the article did they claim the cuts were unique.
I cannot fathom why people are so defensive about this article and say it makes claims it never does actually make. This might actually be more interesting than the article itself…
I don’t understand the intense negativity of comments on this post. What is fascinating is that the Japanese has systematised cutting to the degree where things become more specialised the more conplicated the cut.
I did find this very interesting. Not trying to shame the critics, but there are interesting things in this article and whilst it may not be in testing to you, that’s ok just move along?
There’s a raw nerve around a specific kind of exoticism found in writings about Japan, where they’re so weird and different and secret. I do think the intro plays into that.
Nothing here is super different from most cutting except maybe the decorative cuts, and annoyingly that’s actually the shortest part of the article.
I have to say, this surprised me. I had to reread the intro again, because I didn’t see the author refer to any of that, and I thought I must have misread the article.
But no, he neither says they are secret, weird or even different. He literally writes “ In this article, we will take a look at some of the common vegetable cutting techniques used in Japanese cooking.”
How does the intro play into any of these things? Japanese culture seems to have been using these cuts for an extraordinarily long time, and the techniques appear to have been developed in isolation to the development of western cuts. I don’t see people complaining about articles on French-style cuts not noting that these cuts are the same as Japanese cuts…
Cutting food to the right shape to cook right and look nice really scratches all my engineer/programmer/chemist itches and when I get irritated because someone else in my household doesn't cut the vegetables "right" I have to take a breath and remind myself that this is MY problem not theirs.
This article gave me fun names for what I already knew and loved.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadAnd then proceeds to identify and name them using English cutting techniques and names.
There aren't "100 times more names". Every language will have those names.
And I don't know Japanese, but it doesn't even seem like they have a plethora of more descriptive terms for it than 'finely diced', 'roughly diced' etc. when they're both something-kiri too, for example.
From my imperfect understanding of Japanese cuisine, there is usually "a way to prepare a dish" and deviation from that way can be unwanted or problematic, a bit of a social faux pas.
But yes sure, deviate in France and you might get some bad reviews, be labelled avant-garde, but it's probably fine, and you might be on the way to greatness. I'm pretty ignorant of Japanese culture (not that I'm French either, just spent many holidays there and none in Japan) but I can believe there'd be a stronger visceral reaction to that sort of thing. Boycott the insauspicious restaurant or whatever.
In Eastern style, especially in Japanese/Sushi culinary world, you still julienne a veg similar to all other culinary cultures but Sushi requires special modification for each dish. It’s not saying it’s superior or whatnot, it’s just that sushi requires 5-7 different “types” of julienne, that all have a specific name, as an example.
Some of those techniques are so specific, they aren’t translated or practiced outside of sushi preparation and may not have a “name”.
At least that’s how I took that statement.
Are these "special names" like the "100 names of snow" and actually are literally "dice diagonally", "slice laterally", "make small cubes" etc.?
For example: in French terms, you’d have to explicitly say “julienne the scallions across and dump them in an ice bath”.
For sushi, that’s an explicit technique. The cut, length, trim, and preparation can be conveyed in one word.
So lots of terms but no ambiguity.
Edit: “western” techniques do this too. Braising vs blenching X provides a lot of context that isn’t explicitly stated.
This article places the shapes or cutting techniques described within the context of Japanese cuisine. That someone somewhere else has at one time or another cut a vegetable does not really reflect on the formal techniques of a cuisine whether that be French, Chinese, Italian, Korean, Japanese or other cuisines that put a significant focus on defined techniques and following specific processes.
Maybe readers are inferring some nationalistic element to a cooking tutorial, where people assume that a description of techniques used in Japanese cooking is some kind of claim to ownership of them?
I think this article is interesting on its own terms, because regardless of your heritage, if you haven't studied cooking you might not have experimented with how you cut vegetables. I always used to just straight chop everything when I made a stir fry, but now I try to be more creative.
As for techniques, my favorite is cutting a minimal slice off of round items (think onions) to use as a flat stable bottom before attempting thin slicing.
'List of Japanese words that describe the various ways you chop and slice vegetables' would be merely educational.
This likely refers to “cocotte” [0], the French term for a kind of casserole that might be used for dishes for which that vegetable cut shape is typical — or maybe the shape of the cut is reminiscent of the shape of a cocotte.
[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocotte_(cuisine)
English Wikipedia cocotte disambiguation suggests French oven, which redirects to Dutch oven, which is just what Americans call a casserole.
Is it the enamelling, which Wikipedia suggests is sometimes used as a distinguishing feature between 'Dutch' and 'French' ovens? (I've (British) never heard of the latter before.)
Apparently a cocotte is also an 'elegant prostitute'/courtesan, meaning 'small child' before that. So is a cocotte a small casserole, peut être?
It seems cocotte = English 'casserole'; casserole = saucepan.
The enamel vs. cast iron interior of a cocotte IME in the UK is not significant, but in the US going by Wikipedia anyway enamel = French oven; pas d'enamel = Dutch oven.
...I suppose we've no hope of agreeing on all this if we can't even have a 'cup' be the same size! (Or convince Americans that they shouldn't be (and in many cases would find it easier if they weren't) using volumetric measures for everything anyway, for that matter.)
The French Wikipedia article is clearer than the English one : https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocotte_(cuisine)
Note that a pressure cooker is called a Cocotte minute. Because it cooks quickly.
Cocotte is also a term that can be used for chickens or chicks, but that has nothing to do with cooking utensils.
I'm afraid my French isn't up to reading a Wikipedia entry, which is why I asked (GGP linked the same article).
It's rather that they are false-friends: a french « casserole » is an english ‶sauce pan″ (the most vanilla cookware, a metal pot with a handle).
A cocote has typically more heat inertia (made of thick casted iron), is larger (so you can cook large pieces of meat in it) and thus far less handy.
As for the cut, I'd hardly call it a Japanese cutting technique.
Par exemple: http://chut-je-cuisine.com/pommes-de-terre-tournees/
I have seen a few pieces of Japanese megacorp software that's you would have thought would be produced by their better teams (kernel code for major profit-centre products) and it was always dreadful.
I know megacorp software is often terrible, but this was a whole new level. It was like the "the intern's code" jokes on The Coding Love, but real and very serious (NDAs and everything).
Certainly when looking at it, I didn't have visions of a grandmaster lovingly using the exact, named, carefully maintained, tool for the job.
If you ask kids in some other countries, what do they say? influencers? youtuberd?
(Unless 'desirable' is a bit misleading here and there is some realistic achievability built in?)
The Japanese culture is not known to focus on setting global goals and recursively dividing it into local decision makings and actions. Rather it’s optimized for optimizing local behaviors, which yields amazing features, but often only as features.
Chinese cooking is plain art. Very limited toolings but plenty of beauty and transformation of food into pleasure.
*added qualifier to satisfy detailed criticism
Asia is a big umbrella, my friend. (You can Google for how many countries.) You’d be surprised to know there are Asian countries that went from hands to spoon-and-fork hundreds of years ago and never knew chopsticks. But of course this notion is not exotic enough.
As a result, "India" is occasionally lumped in with "South Asia" but is typically referred to as its own entity in lay conversation.
I suspect part of that is proximity to the middle east, which is also rarely lumped in with "Asia" in colloquial conversation, and general confusion or laziness over needing to specify the "east" part of "east Asia".
Other parts of the country probably speak differently based on who lives there.
I can say this though - if I want to go to a restaurant for "Asian" food, it'll usually be Chinese, Japanese or Vietnamese, and the restaurant will typically offer dishes from at least two of those cuisines (sometimes authentic, sometimes heavily tailored to a Midwestern pallet). On the other hand, if I want Indian food, I'm going to an Indian restaurant, and the closest thing on offer to one of the other above cuisines is some variation of a Manchurian dish from Mumbai, depending on what regional focus or focuses the restaurant offers.
I am curious now though - obviously spoons have been around 'forever' but as eating utensils do they predate British/Portugese colonialism do you know? I understand today spoon/bread/hand is dish, region, and perhaps to some extent class/personal preference dependent, but has it 'always' been so?
(I'm honestly not doing a 'be thankful we brought you spoons' bit here.. I hope it doesn't come across that way. Just genuinely curious as a हिंदी और भारतीय खाने का विद्यार्थी (student of Hindi and Indian food).)
The same way we use “julienne” in French cuisine.
I cannot fathom why people are so defensive about this article and say it makes claims it never does actually make. This might actually be more interesting than the article itself…
I did find this very interesting. Not trying to shame the critics, but there are interesting things in this article and whilst it may not be in testing to you, that’s ok just move along?
Nothing here is super different from most cutting except maybe the decorative cuts, and annoyingly that’s actually the shortest part of the article.
But no, he neither says they are secret, weird or even different. He literally writes “ In this article, we will take a look at some of the common vegetable cutting techniques used in Japanese cooking.”
How does the intro play into any of these things? Japanese culture seems to have been using these cuts for an extraordinarily long time, and the techniques appear to have been developed in isolation to the development of western cuts. I don’t see people complaining about articles on French-style cuts not noting that these cuts are the same as Japanese cuts…
> Unfortunately, in Japanese cooking, there are approximately 100 times more cutting techniques and names.
This article gave me fun names for what I already knew and loved.